Mechanisms set up decades ago to combat global climate change may be the response needed to secure a sustainable future for rapidly urbanising cities.

Overlooking view of Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic. Bishkek is the capital and the largest city in Kyrgyz Republic and one that sits at the crossroads of commercial routes, ushering in urbanisation. Image: Asian Development Bank, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

By Gregory Scruggs, Citiscope

Monday 4 September 2017

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Ahead of a major meeting next week, a prominent group of civil society representatives is urging the United Nations to strengthen its coordinated response to rapid urbanisation by copying mechanisms set up decades ago: those created to combat global climate change.

In a statement this week, the GAP outlines recommendations for the creation of entities it calls an Intergovernmental Panel on Urbanisation and a United Nations Framework Convention on Urban Change.

The GAP statement comes in response to a report released this month by a panel of experts commissioned by the United Nations secretary-general around how to reform the UN’s focus on urban issues.

That panel ended up recommending the creation of a first-ever global body to coordinate international urbanisation — “UN Urban”.

The proposed UN Urban will now be at the heart of a two-day debate next week at UN Headquarters in New York.

That meeting, which will feature top UN brass, urban development ministers, big-city mayors and major thinkers in contemporary urbanism, will more broadly discuss how to reform UN-Habitat, the UNs lead agency on urbanisation.

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GAP promoted the idea of such a panel in its May 2016 statement Partnerships for the New Urban Agenda as a means to increase public awareness and consolidate scientific understanding based on research and data on the meaning and importance of sustainable urbanisation.

The GAP, formed ahead of last year’s Habitat III summit on the future of cities and representing 16 constituencies, welcomed the UN Urban proposal. But it also is urging the UN General Assembly, which ultimately will act on the panel’s recommendations, to go further.

“Global governance of urbanisation is as urgent now as was the establishment of global governance of climate change and environmental issues thirty years ago,” the statement reads.

To that end, the GAP suggests an alternative to UN Urban in the form of an Intergovernmental Panel on Urbanisation and a United Nations Framework Convention on Urban Change. Both are modeled on existing mechanisms to address climate change.

Monday’s statement argued that such entities “upgrade significantly knowledge of urban issues as the IPCC did regarding environment and climate change,” a reference to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, created in 1988. The GAP is calling for a new urban-focused entity based on an “updated” version of the IPCC.

“GAP promoted the idea of such a panel in its May 2016 statement Partnerships for the New Urban Agenda as a means to increase public awareness and consolidate scientific understanding based on research and data on the meaning and importance of sustainable urbanisation,” GAP President Eugénie Birch told Citiscope.

“We viewed it as a complement to the extensive work undertaken by the UN, including UN-Habitat, global researchers and the many other contributors to knowledge about cities and human settlements,” she said. “The idea gained considerable support during the New Urban Agenda negotiations and might be worth reconsidering.”

Stakeholder role

In its statement, the GAP also criticised the panel of experts’ proposed reforms to the governance structure of UN-Habitat, which has suffered from flagging donor confidence in recent years.

The group called the proposal, which would expand the agency’s existing two oversight committees to five, “a compromise, far short of a genuine tripartite arrangement involving member states, local authorities and stakeholders”.

The panel does recommend the creation of committees of local authorities and stakeholder representatives. But these bodies would be purely advisory and without a “seat at the table” of any of the agency’s oversight boards, as stakeholders have been calling for.

Still, the GAP is complimentary toward the panel for its recognition of “the necessity of collecting sub-urban data if the world is going to deal seriously with inequality and social exclusion.” The statement goes on to note, “Urbanists have been calling for this kind of analysis for years — but many economists and statisticians have not agreed.”

In turn, it recommends a prominent role for stakeholders. In making this proposal, it cites the example of the “Know Your City” campaign by Slum/Shack Dwellers International, an NGO, whereby residents of informal settlements are trained to collect data in communities that municipal governments often overlook.

Know Your City’s database currently has information from dozens of settlements in 10 countries across Africa and Asia, with data points as detailed as the ratio of toilet seats to residents. If empowered as an official data collection method, Know Your City could be scaled up to meet the data need in the rapidly growing informal sector.

Civil society is slated to have a chance to discuss these recommendations at next week’s meeting. A draft schedule for the 5-6 September event is available here.

This story was published with permission from Citiscope, a non-profit news outlet that covers innovations in cities. More at Citiscope.org